Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company's early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world's most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands....

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When anyone can start a business (when everyone is running their career like a business), it begs a question. This is your one chance at life, you can have anything you want, what is worth doing?

Most people don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own.

They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won't make them happy.

Anything You Want is a manifesto about living life, appreciating enough, and doing what matters. It's most of what fabled entrepreneur Derek Sivers learned in ten years of starting and growing a small business, compacted into something you can listen to in an hour and a half. A life worth living starts with knowing your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what's worth doing.

I was down with fever, shivering and still had a great time listening and was all ears.

Next to "brain vs capital" the best, most useful handson advice book for entrepreneurs I came across. I finished it with "that's how I want to do it!".

The author describes how, by focusing 100% on building something useful that your customers will love to pay. He argues how his business did not need a big strategy because he did what felt intuitively right to him and offered ever increasing customer value. No super site, no one-of-a-kind idea but total control over a super successful business, started on hardly more than 25 bucks for a programming course book.

Before the purchase, I doubted that you can squeeze 10 years of experience of growing a multimillion dollar business into 1.5 hours of reading. But these 1.5 hours are the clearest, densest thoughts on entrepreneurship I read so far. I think that's because this approach just makes simple sense.